Influenced by the weather in the Arctic circle, the last few days of winter this year in North America were particularly cold and windy. Yet the high-level meeting between the US and China in the northernmost part of the US during those days was marked by an exceptional heated dialogue and great tension.

Armed with the confidence of a rising power, Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi, the most senior foreign policy officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), arrived in Alaska. The duo has been told by China’s top leaders that “the East is on the rise and the West in decline” and “the East is in good order and the West in chaos”, and that they can “look at the rest of the world at eye level”.

This was the first high-level contact between China and the US after Joe Biden took office. The two CCP officials came with a fiery temper, contrasting starkly to the severely cold weather in Alaska. There were various reasons for that, and they were all related to what the US did prior to the meeting. First, Washington announced sanctions against 24 National People’s Congress members and Hong Kong officials. Second, the US president held a summit with four US allies, including Japan. Washington also arranged for Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to be the first foreign head of state to visit the US, in what is obviously an allies’ diplomacy. Third, the US state secretary and defense secretary held a “2+2 meeting” in Japan and South Korea. Afterwards, a joint statement was issued. However, the US officials did not move on to Beijing, which is 900 kilometers away and one hour away by plane. The Sino-US meeting had to be held on American soil, and humiliatingly the age-old Yang had to travel a long way to get there.

Attempting to establish a “strategic dialogue mechanism”, the Chinese side portrayed the meeting in Alaska as a “Sino-US high-level strategic dialogue”. That was a trick Beijing had adopted to fool Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Yet before the meeting, Washington stated clearly the meeting was not a strategic dialogue nor a mechanism but a “one-off” session. State Secretary Antony Blinken also made it that China “is the biggest geopolitical challenge that the US faces in the 21st century”. Meanwhile, according to a recent survey, 89 percent of Americans saw China as America’s competitor or rival country. In Washington, being tough on China is one of the few consensuses shared by the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

What was the main objective of Yang and Wang then? And how did Yang’s performative serve the objective? To understand their confrontation strategy, one has to understand the essence of the contest between China and the US.

At present, there are four Cs in the Sino-US contest: cooperation, competition, confrontation and conflict. Washington’s approach is to apply each C to different areas. For economic and trade issues, climate and the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, the two countries can cooperate. In the realm of technology, there has to be competition. In terms of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang, human rights, cyber attacks, and the suppression of US allies, the US must confront and resist China. As two big nuclear powers, the US and China cannot directly run into military conflict with each other and, therefore, preventing military conflicts is the bottom line.

China only wants cooperation and does not want to compete with the US in areas including technology management, and surveillance of production chains. It does not want to confront the US either, and it is incapable of and has no intention to fight a war with the US. The CCP is well aware that the American eagle can stretch its tentacles in the Atlantic Ocean (through NATO) and the Pacific Ocean (through its ties with four allies). If China goes to war with the US, it would be tantamount to setting off a series of explosions. China knows that well, but it still wants to engage in a “small chicken game”. It tries to fight with the US by using a bundling strategy. The lives of the 1.4 billion people in China are worthless in the eyes of the CCP, and so the CCP pits them against the American people. Which is why Beijing is looking all bold and daring, using cooperation as a bait and threatening conflicts as it tries to force the US to give up on confronting and competing with China.

When a person becomes utterly desperate, logic and rationality will abandon him. Yang and Wang accused the US of interfering in China’s internal affairs, and yet they said it was not only the US that could judge US democracy. They insisted that China and the US had their own form of democracy, but they called for building a community of shared future for mankind. Prior to the meeting, they overestimated the Americans; during the meeting, they belittled all American people. They seemed not afraid that the US would twist China’s neck, and yet they begged the US to cooperate with China and remove the trade tariffs imposed on China. They accused the US of showing no hospitality or diplomatic etiquette, but they failed to control their own emotions and occupied a large chunk of the meeting time speaking. They criticized the US for being domineering and yet they pointed their fingers (fortunately not their middle fingers) at US officials when they talked. None of that had the composure of an official who “looks at the rest of the world at eye level”, or the confidence one should have when “the US does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength”. The behaviors of Yang and Wang were the classic “inferiority-superiority complex syndrome”, and it was also a self-inflicted form of humiliation brought by a sense of euphoria.

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher once said: “Power is like being a lady... if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

(Xia Ming, Professor of Political Science, the City University of New York )

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